Spaced Out - Screen Sound Space

With the firm belief that you cannot theorize about cinematic media unless you are making it, here is a recent project that explores the technology driven experience of cinema itself. What is it to watch? What is our relationship to the moving image and the apparatus of its delivery? What space do we occupy in the projected story unfolding? How does our perception and experience alter with the evolution of technology? What is it to be watcher? Most importantly how have the evolutions in the technical apperatus of cinema changed our experience of the cinematic form?

The cinematic experience, the art of watching, is one built on a well established contract wrought between viewer and subject. Enforced by techno-cultural constraints we are positioned as viewers into a particular mode. The movie exists in a frame. What is inside the frame is the movie, what is outside the frame is not. We are removed and apart from the cinematic space occupied by story and character, event spectacle. We look into that with voyeuristic eyes but we do not share it. The space is composed by the frame and we observe the frame as a painting in motion; forming concepts, ideas and connections based on the semantics and formalities of the frame as mediator.But technology evolves and our mode of observance cant help but evolve with it. Stereo and wide-screen in tandem lead to positioning; spatial placement and a small step towards an actualization of space. A character positioned left speaks and his heard from the left it is a fundamentally dynamic increment towards an actualization of spatial positioning. An awareness of the composed space that transcends a composed frame.But we creep, are inched, ever deeper into the frame itself and surround sound dissipates the framic screen of division and illusion. We drift into a composition of space itself. Where the frame is but a perspective showing but a fraction of the whole, a whole that is not abstracted but presented in clear and present actuality. We hear as the characters hear. We share a space we once only bore witness to and our derived and evoked meanings are assembled in a complex structure of immersion and cohabitation.